


He Fell in Love Instantly

by viksherenqueer



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, M/M, Sad, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 21:06:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5680798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viksherenqueer/pseuds/viksherenqueer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil Palmer was the type of person who could look at the worn palms and tired eyes and feathered hair of a stranger and understand their ins and outs and beginnings and ends and would fall so fast and so hard for these people. Earl Harlan fell in love with the familiar, the comforting, the things he understood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Fell in Love Instantly

**Author's Note:**

> just a short little thing I decided to write to kinda get my creative juices flowing. of course it involves earl harlan being sad

“ _He grinned, and everything about him was perfect, and I fell in love instantly._ ”

It was the sort of thing that made him feel a little ill in his core, but not angry. Just sad. Earl Harlan wasn’t very good at being angry. He was, however, exceptionally good at being sad. Earl knew this was probably his own fault. Why did he save files from the show? Why did he play them through his speakers when he drove or his headphones when he jogged? He knew they were going to make him sad. Maybe he liked it in some strange, fucked up way. He wasn’t entirely sure, but emotional decisions weren’t his forte either.

He turned his radio all the way down to deafen out Cecil Palmer’s voice and gripped his steering wheel tightly. He didn’t like to feel bitter, but it was a feeling he couldn’t drown out. He couldn’t shove it away. Cecil Palmer always fell in love hard and fast. Cecil Palmer was the type of person who could look at the worn palms and tired eyes and feathered hair of a stranger and understand their ins and outs and beginnings and ends and would fall so fast and so hard for these people. Sometimes he didn’t even know their names, but that did not matter. The way they walked was just-so, or the way they spoke resonated deep within him. Cecil Palmer fell in love with the small idiosyncrasies of human beings. The small bits of them that stood out from amongst the rest. The things other people would glaze over without a second thought. Cecil Palmer had a lot of love to spread around, and once again had found someone to share it with.

Earl Harlan did not like feeling bitter. He did not like thinking of how once he was Cecil’s best friend. How he had told Cecil he loved him, and the other had responded with smiles and “Oh Earl’s” and hair ruffles. Earl didn’t want to think about despite the years that had separated him, the second he had locked eyes with the other every emotion he had felt when they were young came rushing back to him. Earl did not like to think that was still mentally nineteen, and hadn’t shaken off the love of his teen years. But that was exactly the case. He had been frozen as nineteen for many years, and locked in the same mental state he had been in at that exact moment in time when his body decided to stop growing. 

Earl did not like to think about the past few centuries he had spent completely and entirely in love with a disinterested person who spent most of their time falling in love with strangers. 

Earl had told Cecil everything. He had been honest and raw and real with the other in a way he had never felt comfortable being with any other human being. They could’ve had something.

Instead they had Earl, a now grown man, sitting in the front seat of his car with tears streaming down his face as he thought about the love of his life and knew the other was certainly not thinking about him in this current moment. Earl Harlan was not very good at love.

Earl Harlan, however, was exceptionally good at being sad.


End file.
